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Report
Can low-wage workers find better jobs?
There is growing concern over rising economic inequality, the decline of the middle class, and a polarization of the U.S. workforce. This study examines the extent to which low-wage workers in the United States transition to better jobs, and explores the factors associated with such a move up the job ladder. Using data covering the expansion following the Great Recession (2011-17) and focusing on short-term labor market transitions, we find that around 70 percent of low-wage workers stayed in the same job, 11 percent exited the labor force, 7 percent became unemployed, and 6 percent switched ...
Report
Underemployment in the early careers of college graduates following the Great Recession
Though labor market conditions steadily improved following the Great Recession, underemployment among recent college graduates continued to climb, reaching highs not seen since the early 1990s. In this paper, we take a closer look at the jobs held by underemployed college graduates in the early stages of their careers during the first few years after the Great Recession. Contrary to popular perception, we show that relatively few recent graduates were working in low-skilled service jobs, and that many of the underemployed worked in fairly well paid non-college jobs requiring some degree of ...
Working Paper
Dynamic Responses to Immigration
I analyze the dynamic effects of immigration by estimating an equilibrium model of local labor markets in the US. The model includes firms in multiple cities and sectors which combine capital, skilled and unskilled labor in production, and forward-looking workers who choose their sector and location each period as a dynamic discrete choice. A counterfactual unskilled immigration inflow leads to an initial wage drop for unskilled workers and a wage increase for skilled workers. These effects dissipate rapidly as unskilled workers migrate away from heavily affected cities and workers shift ...
Working Paper
Explaining Intergenerational Mobility: The Role of Fertility and Family Transfers
Poor families have more children and transfer less resources to them. This suggests that family decisions about fertility and transfers dampen intergenerational mobility. To evaluate the quantitative importance of this mechanism, we extend the standard heterogeneous agent life cycle model with earnings risk and credit constraints to allow for endogenous fertility, family transfers, and education. The model, estimated to the US in the 2000s, implies that a counterfactual flat income-fertility profile would-through the equalization of initial conditions-increase intergenerational mobility by ...
Working Paper
What is the source of the intergenerational correlation in earnings?
This paper uses a dynastic model of household behavior to estimate and decomposed the correlations in earnings across generations. The estimate model can explain 75% to 80% of the observed correlation in lifetime earnings between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and families across generations. The main results are that the family and division of labor within the household are the main source of the correlation across generation and not just assorting mating. The interaction of human capital accumulation in labor market, the nonlinear return to part-time versus full-time work, and the ...
Working Paper
What Accounts for the Racial Gap in Time Allocation and Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital?
This paper analyzes the sources of the racial difference in the intergenerational transmission of human capital by developing and estimating a dynastic model of parental time and monetary inputs in early childhood with endogenous fertility, home hours, labor supply, marriage, and divorce. It finds that the racial differences in the marriage matching patterns lead to racial differences in labor supply and home hours of couples. Although both the black-white labor market earnings and marriage market gaps are important sources of the black-white achievement gap, the assortative mating and ...
Working Paper
Estimation of Dynastic Life-Cycle Discrete Choice Models
This paper explores the estimation of a class of life-cycle discrete choice intergenerational models. It proposes a new semiparametric estimator. It shows that it is root-N-consistent and asymptotically normally distributed. We compare our estimator with a modified version of the full solution maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) in a Monte Carlo study. Our estimator performs comparably to the MLE in a finite sample but greatly reduces the computational cost. The paper documents that the quantity-quality trade-offs depend on the household composition and specialization in the household. Using ...
Working Paper
Trade and Labor Market Dynamics: General Equilibrium Analysis of the China Trade Shock
We develop a dynamic trade model with spatially distinct labor markets facing varying exposure to international trade. The model captures the role of labor mobility frictions, goods mobility frictions, geographic factors, and input-output linkages in determining equilibrium allocations. We show how to solve the equilibrium of the model and take the model to the data without assuming that the economy is at a steady state and without estimating productivities, migration frictions, or trade costs, which can be difficult to identify. We calibrate the model to 22 sectors, 38 countries, and 50 U.S. ...
Working Paper
Occupation Mobility, Human Capital and the Aggregate Consequences of Task-Biased Innovations
We construct a dynamic general equilibrium model with occupation mobility, human capital accumulation and endogenous assignment of workers to tasks to quantitatively assess the aggregate impact of automation and other task-biased technological innovations. We extend recent quantitative general equilibrium Roy models to a setting with dynamic occupational choices and human capital accumulation. We provide a set of conditions for the problem of workers to be written in recursive form and provide a sharp characterization for the optimal mobility of individual workers and for the aggregate supply ...
Working Paper
The Macroeconomic Consequences of Early Childhood Development Policies
To study long-run large-scale early childhood policies, this paper incorporates early childhood investments into a standard general-equilibrium (GE) heterogeneous-agent overlapping-generations model. After estimating it using US data, we show that an RCT evaluation of a short-run small-scale early childhood program in the model predicts effects on children's education and income that are similar to the empirical evidence. A long-run large-scale program, however, yields twice as large welfare gains, even after considering GE and taxation effects. Key to this difference is that investing in a ...